It has been a year since Gruvi raised over £150,000 on Crowdcube, thanks to the support of 88 investors. Gruvi’s platform provides entertainment brands with powerful tools and tracking that streamline audiences through to watching content and buying tickets on social media at higher conversion rates than traditional display advertising. Gruvi’s client base includes HBO, Sony, Disney, etc where they have worked on 300 international campaigns. We caught up with CEO Ben Johnson to see how the raise has helped grow the business.
Could you tell us about Gruvi?
Gruvi helps global entertainment brands cleverly reach and engage audiences. We do this by providing a comprehensive campaign management system that creates, deploys and tracks the impact of digital campaign internationally, from initial contact through to purchase of a cinema ticket, stream, download, etc.
We are passionate about audiences because our clients thrive on the customer, not clicks. Gruvi’s comprehensive campaign management systems shift the focus from units to users.
It’s been one year since you raised £150,000 on Crowdcube, what’s happened at Gruvi since then?
Since funding we’ve developed access to a trading desk, allowing us to buy display and video media internationally. This cements our position as a provider of a better, cheaper and more comprehensive service than media agencies. We also relaunched Gruvi and improved the speed of campaign launch, and the range of devices and formats we now cover with our advertising technology. We have also included access to Twitter, and are looking at closer integrations with Youtube and Facebook We have also worked on pan-European campaigns with MTG and Viasat, integrated an online marketing platform with ODEON cinemas in the UK that includes a Chatbot for handling customer enquiries, and rolled out campaigns for many smaller independent companies internationally.
What challenges have you faced, or are perhaps still facing?
We know things are rarely plain sailing in business, particularly for startups, and therefore people expect there to be downs as well as ups. We believe transparency is a good thing. We are fighting against large media agencies who we feel offer a poor service with many undisclosed fees. Unfortunately, these are the gatekeepers on many of our major contracts. We have been getting round this by offering our services directly to the brands, who have then dropped their agency or got them to work with us. It hasn’t always been easy, but we feel the combination of stunning creative tools for engaging audiences and targeted ad buys across platforms to attract the right audiences, is a winning formula.
We also feel that writing about our experiences is helping us. We now contribute to Celluloid Junkie and the Canada Media Fund Trends Blog and are hoping to win more editorial partnerships in the future with the likes of the Events Cinema Association, Slated and Europa Distribution, which each have powerful connections to our customer base. Part of our editorial efforts is also a white paper due to launch on February 22. ‘Winning your Audiences. Marketing Movies in the Connected World’ looks at the current state of the industry. In it, we share case studies and advertising methodology used at Gruvi for indie film distribution. It will be a useful read for the entertainment industry and hopefully, spark some interesting debates on how things may change in the future
Why did you choose to raise finance from the crowd over more traditional routes to finance, and are there any additional benefits of being backed by a crowd of investors?
We liked the idea of the public face of the raise. We realised that approaching traditional VCs was not got going to work, as they tend not to invest in media-related businesses, even ones with a heavy tech focus such as Gruvi.
We’re absolutely delighted with those who invested through Crowdcube. We’ve had several really great conversations with various investors about what’s going on with the business. Their advice has always been hugely beneficial and their interest really motivating. We are keeping them regularly informed about what is happening on the business side, but also in terms of the product development and clients.
What’s next for Gruvi?
Our newest product launch is the cinema chatbot. An AI integrated with powerful platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. providing brands with new and exciting ways of communicating with customers by providing useful, timely information tailored to them.
Earlier this year, in collaboration with Twitter, we launched “Dynamic Tweets”, which involves programmatically presenting users with Tweets tailored to their geolocation. This allows brands to reach out to users with hyper-local information and purchase links that dynamically adjust to the user. It’s a simple setup but results in a powerful campaign. For our next move, we are hoping to close a major film distribution business in the Nordics on a media and performance-related contract. We’re also very interested in the continued roll out of Chatbot technology we launched with Odeon. We have many different opportunities to incorporate this tech into pretty much everything that Gruvi does.
To find out more about Gruvi, take a look at the company page here.